7.28.2015

Knee pads are one of the most critical pieces of equipment when playing roller derby. All the veteran Derby players will tell you not to skimp on them. I have huge knee pads and, not only that, I have gaskets that I wear underneath to fill in any empty space. It's like falling on a cloud. As an aside, I can tell you that I always wear my knee pads since I broke my patella during an open skate. I was feeling confident and happy and I ended up tripping over a kid who fell right in front of me. So, yeah, I'm pretty passionate about wearing them now.

In Derby, we spend a lot of time practicing falling, especially with the new girls. And it's drilled into you pretty quickly that once you fall you need to get back up immediately. 3 seconds is the general rule. Faster is better. Of course, not falling at all is best.

If you stay down too long, you become an impediment to other players and you are not helping your team.

I think maybe we all could use some spiritual or metaphorical or emotional knee pads, and the training to rise up quickly after life (or "Mayhem Steamroller") puts you down on the ground.

7.13.2015

Here we are again. To get cleared for sports. Again. Broken toe is healed but toenail is in process of falling off. When Yo discovered that lovely piece of anatomy coming off, I thought she had found a bug because she screamed, jumped up, and backed away from where she had been cutting her toenails. I'm afraid I laughed and she cried. Then we googled losing your toenail so it didn't seem so scary after that. She'll just have to tape it while she plays sports but I think it will come off at some point. Gross. UPDATE: toenail came off and was possibly grosser than imagined.

5.14.2015

Habtamu had an osteochondroma removed from his right leg last September. It is all healed and he has not had any problems from it since. We had known about it for a couple of years. It is the source of one of my finest parenting moments. Not. He'd been complaining about his knee hurting and swelling up. I'd been telling him to toughen up, in so many words. Finally I took him into the Dr who took one look/feel and said "Oh yeah. It's osteochondroma.... that probably hurts." D'oh.

We had a lovely Christmas in Florida with the Gardners.

Day after we got back, Yordanos broke her collar bone at soccer. Some things I didn't know about broken collar bones: if the person is young enough, the broken parts of the bones will send out bony tendrils and reconnect and grow together and remodel over time. Yordanos was right on the edge of this age and it didn't look like it was growing back. At her recent checkup, however, there was definitely bone connecting the two pieces! In adults, the broken bits will be held together by scar tissue, basically, and will not have the new bone growth.

Then in March, Habtamu had an emergency appendectomy. Is there any other kind? It didn't burst, but it laid him low for awhile.

The morning before he had appendix out:

Just got the bill for the appendectomy... the hospital charged insurance $50,000. Are you kidding me? We could go round in circles about how wrong this is, and all that is broken in healthcare... But literally, people are one appendectomy away from financial ruin. We were still paying for the osteochondroma, so I called to set up a payment plan for the appendectomy. They were kind enough to tack it on to the end of the first bill. So I said, "Ok, so basically I will just keep paying indefinitely..."

Now I've got to get an MRI on my knee. It's been a-hurting for awhile, and I finally went in to the kids' Ortho. See above issues to understand why we have our own Ortho Dr. now.